<snip>
> > In all fairness to Protel, this is a PCAD feature which has now been
> > ported over to Protel but who cares?
<snip>
> > Brad Velander
>
> Talking of PCAD, has anyone else had a flyer in the mail recently
> advertising P-CAD 2001 at a price not too far removed from the
> new Protel pricing?
>
> Andy Gulliver
I can't say I have, but I have already commented on a couple of occasions
(in relatively recent times) that the difference in price between Protel and
PCAD is narrowing. The "from scratch" price for a PCAD 2001 seat is US$9,995
(according to the PCAD Website set up by Protel), while the corresponding
price for Protel 99 SE, after the end of this month, will be US$7,995 (up
from the present US$5,995).
I don't know if Protel intends to increase the price for PCAD 2001, but if
so, there has been no mention of this on the PCAD Website to date.
The provision of this new feature in both PCAD 2001 and Protel 99 SE is not
inconsistent with my impression that Protel could be planning to merge
future versions of these products.
>From some angles, this would not necessarily be a bad thing. As someone who
has used an earlier DOS version of PCAD, I am aware that there are some
aspects of PCAD which have not been provided in Protel to date. If such
aspects were retained (or retained in substance) in a merged product, the
result would be an application with even greater capabilities than (the
present) Protel 99 SE.
OTOH, PCAD has previously been distinctly "up-market" from Protel, and in
some ways, could have been thought of as a variant of Autocad (another
similarly "up-market" product) specifically customised for PCB-designing
purposes. In the event that PCAD and Protel were merged, there would be one
less CAD application available in the market for prospective purchasers to
select between; in place of Protel occupying a "mid-market" niche and PCAD
occupying a higher-up niche, there would be a merged application occupying a
niche higher up than that occupied by Protel in the past.
(In saying the above though, I am aware that there are differences between
Autocad and PCAD, and that "addon" packages are now available for use with
Autocad, which facilitate the design of PCBs and the associated schematic
diagrams. (During the mid-1980s, I assisted a then fellow employee in
creating addon software for ("in-house") use with Autocad for such purposes,
as such "addon" software was not otherwise available at that time.))
In making the above observations, I am not suggesting that change should not
occur. And in a free market, Protel has the right to acquire PCAD (or at
least the right to attempt to acquire PCAD, had that not actually been
accomplished), and/or to move its original product "up-market", and/or to
create a merged application which is "up-market" compared with previous
versions of Protel. (And if Protel did *not* behave in this way, it is
certainly not out of the question that one or more of its competitors would
do so instead.) That said, change is not always for the better, and even
when change is not unconditionally bad, some aspects of it can still be
undesirable.
But doubtless we shall see what happens in due course...
Regards,
Geoff Harland.
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